Related: I'm often shocked that people don't use common sense to handle situations where they don't have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don't have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
Languages are a good example.
The only foreign language I've actually studied systematically in school is French. And yet: I can understand a newspaper article in Spanish, get a printer that's stuck in Dutch language mode back to English, use an Italian book as a reference for an art history paper, understand the lyrics to a Yiddish song, and navigate the subway in a German-speaking city.
It's just using cognates and common sense. But people always act shocked, and seem to think that if you haven't studied a language in school you have to be completely helpless.
Software is another example. Give me a new piece of software and I'll muddle around and see what the buttons do, like a normal person. Apparently many office workers demand an official tutorial and won't even touch the software until they've been "taught" to use it.
Related: I'm often shocked that people don't use common sense to handle situations where they don't have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don't have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
I tend to agree, and I've had the same experiences [1]. Still, isn't this exactly how I look to neurotypicals in terms of social knowledge? Couldn't they just as well say, "You don't know how to do small talk? Gee, just try different things until it works!"?
[1] On the first day of Kindergarten, I ruined the...
There's been a recent heavily upvoted and profusely commented post about things people want to learn. It's close to having so many comments in a single day that it should probably have a part 2.
However, the subject seems to inspire thoughts about what *other* people ought to know, and while that's got a good bit of overlap, it's emotionally rather different.
So, what do you think other people ought to know? Any theories about why they haven't learned it already? Any experience with getting someone else to learn something when it started out as your project rather than theirs, especially if the other person was an adult?